Shaq: 'My Job Is to Protect The King'

That's him talking about LeBron. It's title time in Cleveland, maybe Shaquille O'Neal's last few games as a player, maybe Bron Bron's last with the Cavs. And Shaq has something to say.UPDATE:The Night the Cavs Quit on Themselves >>

This is what Shaquille O'Neal calls himself at the July press conference when he officially joins the Cavaliers:

"I'm still the Dun Dada of all big men."

Dun Dada: The bomb. The shit. The King.

Shaq has landed in Cleveland, the unpromised land, the town where dreams go to die, the city whose battered fans know that however ugly things get, they'll get worse. They always have.

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He walks a gantlet of schoolchildren in firehouse-red T-shirts to reach his chair. They clap and he slaps their hands and smiles, a goofy, slightly cross-eyed giant in a dark-gray suit. His shirt and tie are bright pink. He grins politely when the team's owner presents him with a pair of yellow winter boots and a snow shovel, the joke being that during his eighteen years in the NBA, O'Neal has played for Orlando, Miami, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, places where winter means long sleeves.

Shaq has a better joke: After being introduced by Cavs general manager Danny Ferry, his new boss, O'Neal says, "The great Danny Ferry — 'cause we all know Danny Ferry was a great player. A pretty good player. The other day, when I got the call from Danny Ferry, I was like, Danny Ferry, Danny Ferry. I had to check my computer to see who Danny Ferry was, and this is what came up on the Internet."

And he unrolls < target="_blank">a photo of Danny Ferry toward the end of his own thirteen-year NBA career, when he played for the Spurs, ten or so years ago.

In the photograph, Ferry is bent forward, grasping a ball on the hardwood, a pasty, balding clod. Behind him, both huge hands splayed across Ferry's back, his lower torso pressed to Ferry's ass, stands the alpha dog, Dun Dada.

Sitting beside Shaq, Danny Ferry — who spent ten years playing for the Cavs and was a pretty good player only if "pretty good" means utterly overmatched but ever willing to goon it up — laughs it off. It's a safe bet that both Shaq and Danny recall the game in 1996 when Ferry and one of Shaq's Orlando teammates brawled.

"There's two kinds of dirty — dirty and sewer-dirty," Shaq told the media after that game. "Danny Ferry is sewer-dirty and has been ever since he was at Duke."

Coach Mike Brown, seated on Shaq's other side, never played in the NBA. At forty, he's one of the youngest and least experienced coaches in the league. So it's no shock that Shaq has some advice to offer him. Although it really isn't an offer.

"Right now, we don't have any matchup issues," Shaq says, looking sideways at Brown, "and we will not have to double anybody, and you can underline that one hundred times — we won't be doubling anybody."

Brown, too, laughs it off. But O'Neal's not laughing.

"Other teams are going to have matchup problems against us," he says, his voice like muffled thunder. "But we will not be doubling anybody — ever again."

He is the oldest player in the NBA, and the largest, and the wealthiest. He has earned more than $290 million in salary alone during his career — fully $200 million more than Black Jesus, aka Michael Jordan — and has earned both an undergraduate degree in business and an M.B.A. This is the final year of his current contract; the Cavs are paying Shaq $20 million.

This is also the final year of Danny Ferry's contract. And of Mike Brown's. They have won with the Cavaliers — but they have not won a championship.

Oh — and by the way, it's also LeBron James's walk year. The Chosen One. The King. The Akron kid who leapt all the way from St. Vincent — St. Mary High School to the threshold of NBA godhood. Already you can argue that James, at the age of twenty-five, belongs in the same pantheon as Jordan, Magic, Bird, and Kobe. But he is in his seventh season now, and he has yet to lead his team to a championship, and it is impossible to find a Cavs fan who doesn't fear that when he becomes a free agent this July, LeBron will flee Cleveland for New York. It is a desperate fear, anchored in decades of reality. Given a choice, no star stays in Cleveland.

The Dun Dada, who has won four NBA championships — thrice he was Finals MVP — and a throne among Russell and Wilt and Kareem and Hakeem, is quick to acknowledge Bron-Bron's primacy and the press of his potential departure.

"My job is to protect The King," he says. "It's LeBron's team. In a perfect world, if we take care of business and win, he has no choice but to stay here. My motto is very simple: 'Win a ring for The King.' "

The children burst into cheers. Shaq smiles his goofball smile. And somewhere in France, where LeBron is resting for the battles to come, the blind pig, snuffling the warm wind, unroots a truffle black with loam.

He'll take up so much room under the hoop that LeBron will have no lane to drive.

He will feud with James as he feuded with Penny in Orlando and Kobe in Los Angeles.

These are the kinder things the villagers say about Shaq. They have been losing so hard for so long that they can't see what's happening in front of them. Trapped in the only truth all but the oldest of them have ever known — losing as destiny — how can they recognize the unfolding of a mythic tale as old as civilization itself?

He has come to vanquish evil, to release us from fear's bondage, to slay the beast, to restore our collective pride, to raise us to ultimate glory.

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Shane. The Last Samurai. The Man with No Name. Beoshaq.

I barely can grasp it myself, even as it happens in front of me. Game by game by game, Shaq plays himself into shape. His minutes are limited, to keep him fresh for the playoffs — and because, with LeBron James playing at a level unseen since Michael in the prime of his prime, the Cavs don't need to push O'Neal at all to win games. When they do need him, against teams with dominant big men, he raises his game on both ends of the court. He and LeBron share the court and the ball with nary a hitch.

He still can't hit his fucking free throws, though. But every day, he stays after practice, working at it. Autumn turns to winter, and long after most of the Cavs have gone home, Shaq is at the stripe, clanking line drives off every inch of the rim.

"Santa Claus," he bellows, headed my way, dripping sweat. I have long white hair and a white beard, my belly shakes, and he doesn't know my name. So I am Santa. I have been called worse names.

Looking good, Shaq. I like how you're pacing yourself.

"Am I pacing myself? I'm staying out of his way. The type of player he is, you need to stay out of his way. Let him go. I'm not here to dominate the ball. However — just like last night, if you need some buckets, I can turn it on. That's all I'm doing."

Last night was Kobe and the Lakers. Playing twenty-eight minutes, Shaq stomped their young bigs to jelly on both ends of the court. He scored thirteen — including three of four free throws — and stayed out of LeBron's way well enough for James to hit for thirty-seven points and the Cavs to raise their win-loss record to 33 — 11. The game before, in a win against Toronto, Shaq scored sixteen points and became only the fifth player in NBA history to top twenty-eight thousand career points, joining Wilt, Kareem, Michael, and Karl Malone.

Gotta feel good these days, I say.

"I feel fucking fabulous," Shaq says. "I feel good. I'm the old, old bull that has done it. And I'm now with a new show bull. See, when I was with Kobe, it was the medium bull and the young bull. And when I was with Penny, it was the two young bulls."

Young bulls didn't always see eye to eye.

"My thing back then was, it was always gonna be my fault if we don't win, so we're gonna have to do shit my way. When I was with Orlando, we was doing it everybody else's way — and I always got blamed. So I just got it in my head, Fuck it, if I'm gonna get blamed, I'm gonna do it my way. Period, point-blank."

These guys seem to like you.

"I talk to 'em. I tell 'em stories. The good thing about my stories is, it's all believable. A lot of guys here have seen me in my younger years do what I did. It's a close-knit group. This is the funnest, funniest team I've ever been on in my life. Just laughter and guys hanging out; I've never been on a team like that. Most of the teams I've been on always had cliques — this guy hangs with this guy, this guy goes to the movies with this guy, two guys from Europe are doing their thing, one guy's doing albums and movies, one guy's doing a business deal, one guy's telling the coaches whatever, but this guy — LeBron — everyplace we go, he'll send a text — 'Hey, meet us at the steakhouse, eight o'clock, meet us at the movies, we got a party tonight.' This is a very, very close-knit group."

His truck is sitting out in the parking lot, an enormous black Freightliner SportChassis, a metal Superman S clamped to the front grille. I ask him how it handles in the snow.

"Pretty good. I spun out a couple times. Luckily I spun out where nobody was around. This is my first time driving in this mess, and I have heavy feet. I'm gonna just be careful.

"I actually bought that by accident. Well, not accident — I'm gonna say faith. I was in my Lamborghini one day in Phoenix, fuckin' around, and I hit a wet spot and I spun out twice. So when I came in the locker room that night, I said, I'm gettin' rid of that shit. And Amare [Stoudemire] said, I'll buy it. So I saw in my Robb Report they had this big truck for 120, and Amare bought mine for 150, so I took the 150, bought the big-ass truck, and still had 30,000."

The stub is from a game played December 27, 1964. The National Football League World Championship Game, before the Super Bowl existed. Face value: eight bucks.

The seats were fifty-yard line, lower deck. Uncle Manny's seats. He and his family were vacationing in Miami, so Uncle Lorry took me to the game. The Cleveland Browns were seven-point underdogs to the old Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas.

It was nasty cold, the wind whipping off Lake Erie. Unitas threw for ninety-five yards, with two interceptions. It was scoreless at halftime, but Browns QB Frank Ryan — Doctor Frank Ryan, a Ph.D. in math — with the wind at his back in the second half, threw three TD passes. Jim Brown ran for 114 yards. The Browns won 27 — 0 in front of 79,544 fans.

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I had never felt so proud before, and haven't since. Cleveland was the eighth-largest city in the nation. I knew private ecstasy — I fell asleep at night seeing Jim Brown running the sweep — and I was part of something big and wonderful and pure. My town. My team. Me.

Manny's dead. Lorry's seventy-five. I'm staring point-blank at sixty. Cleveland's now the forty-first-largest city in the nation; I left in 1984. The Baltimore Colts play in Indianapolis; the Cleveland Browns are the Baltimore Ravens; the new Cleveland Browns are a sad joke; no Cleveland team has won a big-league title since 1964; no other big-league town has suffered sporting misery so prolonged and profound, so bitter and complete.

Worse: In Cleveland, there is little to believe in, and few who believe. The gloom and failure go far deeper than sports, of course. But sports is where hope's sap still manages to rise to faith once in a while, even on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. I tote the stub with me. I want to know that particular ecstasy one more time before I die.

I hand Shaq the stub in its ziplock bag.

"You went to this game?"

Yes. I was twelve years old. You know how starved for joy this city is? How long we've waited?

"Of course I do. To come here and help LeBron win the first title in forty-six years — it'll be perfect. Not only will it be perfect, it'll be never forgotten."

Generations of Clevelanders yet unborn will trill your name to the heavens.

"It will be legendary."

And LeBron's name, too, of course.

"I'm going to help him help me. I'll help him get him one; he's gonna help me get five. Business. I ran three different corporations my way, and I ran 'em successfully. Now I'm an older guy and somebody brought me in as a consultant — to overlook a younger CEO. That's how I look at it: business."

You like Cleveland?

"I love it. Now that I'm older, I need to chill and relax, and this city does that for me. Every day after practice, I'm at my house — I'm sitting and I'm getting rest. Shit, when I was in Miami and L. A., I was making up shit to do, go here, go there, party — but in this city, I can just chill out and it's like a nice calmness. I live out in Richfield in the woods with fucking deer and birds. It's nice and quiet. It's peaceful, and I think it's good for me right now."

Shaq has long been listed as seven feet one inch tall and weighing 325 pounds. He's way bigger than that. Zydrunas Ilgauskas, the Cavs' elderly Lithuanian center, is seven three; when O'Neal and Z stand together, they're the same height. As for Shaq's bulk, add forty pounds. Maybe fifty. Ilgauskas, a thirteen-year NBA vet, is listed at 260 pounds and didn't mind losing his starting job to O'Neal, but he refused to bang with him in the gym.

"I won't do that," said Z. "Somebody else gonna have to guard him in practice. Otherwise I won't last till Christmas."

Even here, in a locker room full of sculpted giants, he is sui generis, a sequoia of muscle. The hieroglyphs scrolling down from his mammoth shoulders — Diesel, Superman, Punisher: like Yahweh, his names are numberless — are a hero's codex, a warrior's proud embrace of do-or-die.

That is why he spits upon the double-team. To need help protecting the rim is to be weak, and to weaken the team.

"I always tell the guys: Don't fuckin' help me. If a guy's down there roasting me, let him roast me. Let him roast me. Don't help me — don't give other guys the opportunity to shoot."

And that is also why he is here. Last season ended in heartache and fury when the Cavs lost in the conference finals to the Orlando Magic, tormented and finally undone by young Dwight Howard, the next great NBA center. The Cavs had the league's best player and record, but nobody strong enough to stop Howard down low. They double-teamed him to keep him from scoring on dunk after dunk, and Orlando's three-point snipers buried shot after shot after shot.

Never again. On this icy February night, and for the second time this season, O'Neal plays the twenty-four-year-old, six-eleven, 265-pound Howard solo, banging and grinding on each half-court set, fouling hard and forcing Howard to foul, holding Howard scoreless for the final seven minutes of a close game — and for the second time this season, the Cavs beat the Magic.

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After the win, Shaq's angry about a couple of things. Number One, Orlando had the gall to double-team him. Number One-A, Dwight Howard donned a cape at the slam-dunk fest two years ago and has been posing as Superman ever since.

"When I was coming up," he growls, "I never doubled anybody. So you tell me who the real Superman is. Don't play me with two guys and call yourself Superman."

Maybe he's half joking. Maybe he's trying to sow some seeds of fear and self-doubt inside young Dwight Howard's head tonight because they'll collide again down the road. Or maybe it's simply the CEO in the black three-piece suit he's sporting tonight letting off some steam. If so, Shaq's scowl and snarl show none of that. Each word is freighted with a guttural contempt.

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"Don't compare me to nobody. I've played against some of the greatest guys ever, and I've stood up — I can stand up against anybody."

Then he shushes two younger teammates, Danny Green and Jamario Moon, singing and shouting a few feet away.

Green, a rookie, and Moon, a journeyman in his first year with the team, hoot at each other.

"We gotta be quiet because they doin' a interview with Shaq?" Green squeaks.

"I'm a grown-ass man, dawg. A grown-ass man. Don't be shushing me."

"Moon," Shaq rumbles, not bothering to look over from his chair. "Shut your mouth."

"Superdome," Moon says. "I want him to come over here. I want him to come over here."

"You better be careful," Green warns.

"I want him over here. I can throw a no-look towel pass" — and Moon does, skimming it past O'Neal and into the big wood bucket sitting in the middle of the floor.

Shaq finally swivels toward him.

"Yo," Shaq says, glowering with menace. "Do it again."

Chances are, O'Neal's menace is feigned. But Jamario Moon ain't about to try and find out. Not tonight, anyway.

Yeah, that's LeBron over there in the corner nearest the door to the showers. He's the guy behind the media scrum — fifteen, maybe twenty writers and broadcasters who jockey each night for position and wait for King James to descend in his towel. As he dresses, they ask him the same questions over and over and night after night, and they yawn and nod their weary heads as he offers the same answers.

It is, as rituals go, as painless and empty as can be. Certain subjects — his impending free agency foremost among them — are off-limits. He is always articulate and thoughtful — for ten minutes or so. Then he says, "All right," and they scurry off, back to the designated media room to file their stories. The bravest and neediest will hang a while longer, hoping to sidle up to the Chosen One for one drop more of his grace.

If anything like this exists outside of the Vatican, I'm unaware of it. I have dutifully asked the Cavaliers' media people to arrange a five-minute audience with LBJ, but that ain't happening without a pair of big titties and spike heels. I know beat writers who've spent six years awaiting a one-on-one sit-down with James; if he re-signs with Cleveland — and I'll bet you five large that he does — it will be partly because he could never maintain so regal a distance from the baying media hounds of New York City.

And LeBron is a sensitive motherfucker. I don't blame him — the hounds have been after him since his sophomore year in high school — but when I sidle up after the scrum departs to ask him about Shaq, he bristles at my question:

What's Shaq brought to you? The four rings, the big-dog persona — what has he brought that has made a difference to you so far?

"What's he brought to me?" Bron asks, eyes wide. "I'm the same."

In my clumsy effort to avoid the song-and-dance I've heard a hundred times already — "What's it like to play with Shaq, LeBron?" "It's like a dream come true for me to play with a legend like Shaq" — I've unintentionally implied the Chosen One was lacking something prior to O'Neal's arrival.

"No matter what teammate come upon this team, I'm gonna be the same guy," LeBron says. "I love all my teammates."

I have no time to explain what I meant, which simply was this: When the shit thickens during this year's playoffs, and the Cavs, including Coach Brown, wait limp and fainting for this kid to rescue them — which is precisely what happened last season against Orlando — he won't have to do it alone. Shaq will have his back, and then some.

I must look stricken, because LeBron softens and smiles.

"We're kind of similar, honestly," he says. "We're both like big kids that love to play the game of basketball, have fun every single day, do a lot of laughing, a lot of joking — it's easy for us to get along.

"I mean, he's a four-time champion. Everybody knows what he's been able to do on the court. But off the court — he's much better off the court than he is on the court."

Deep down, I know that I'm just rooting for laundry. Shaq's here for a year, as a consulting CEO, and LeBron could hit the road, too, and someone else will put on the Cavs uniform — just business, like Shaq says — yet I'll still somehow give a damn.

I don't know why that is, or why I still have the stub. My best guess is that before I ever fell in love, before I ever saw the light of my son's eyes, before I ever felt like man enough to make my own place in the world, Cleveland was my world. Whoever's wearing the laundry, those teams are my teams, and they always will be.

So when Shaq tore a ligament in his right thumb in a late-February game against the Celtics, I was aghast. The news wasn't horrible — he'd be out until the playoffs started, in late April — but it was bad enough. I saw him the day after he had surgery on the thumb, at an art show he curated in New York City, and his spirits seemed high — "I'm good," he said. "I'll be all right. You know me" — but he didn't bother to show at the Cavs game the next day in New Jersey, and he dropped out of sight for a month and more.

It was a good stretch for the Cavs on the court but not so good for Shaq. His marriage officially ended; there was word of a harassment suit filed against him by a paramour; his ex struck a deal to produce a show for VH1 called Basketball Wives — sadly, Gold-Digging Hos missed the cut — and his incessant Tweeting seemed to reveal a man who was barely afloat in the deep end. He'd fire off a series of "Yo mama so ugly..." shots and follow up with a quotation from the Dalai Lama or a plea for earthquake relief for Haiti.

He heads back to Cleveland in early April. His mother, Lucille, has just published a book — Walk Like You Have Somewhere to Go, with a foreword by Dwight Howard's boyhood hero — and Shaq's signing copies with her at a table set up at a Sam's Club in Cleveland.

The cast is off his thumb, and he looks like he's dropped at least twenty-five to thirty pounds. His beard's gone, too — without it he seems much younger — and his smile is bright.

"I cut everything out," he says when I mention his weight. "Just salads and chicken. I'm staying in shape, staying out of trouble. I'm ready."

I've been reading online about some trouble, I say. Woman trouble.

"It comes. See, the reason why Shaq O'Neal never responded is it's not important enough. 'Cause you know and I know, if a crime was committed, that'd be the story. No crime was committed. Ever."

I was thinking more about that Basketball Wives show.

"It's all marketing. All marketing for me. It keeps my name out there. I like it."

A white-haired woman who wants him to sign a copy of his mom's book pounds the table in front of him.

"Bring us the ring!" she shouts.

He smiles and signs her book.

"It'll be part of history," he says after she goes. "Then, businesswise, I'll probably get to make any decision I want. However, though, Dr. O'Neal has many options."

You looking forward to seeing Dwight Howard again?

"Yes. See, this is also more marketing. If you compare a twenty-two-year-old to a thirty-nine-year-old, I must be a bad motherfucker."